White Heron by John Ciardi What lifts the heron leaning on the air I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare, a long stroke through the cumulus of trees, a shaped thought at the sky — then gone. O rare! Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees, would have cried Father! Cry anything you please
But praise. By any name or none. But praise the white original burst that lights the heron on his two soft kissing kites. When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays, I sit by pond scums till the air recites It’s heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.
The person who called was standing at the Eureka waterfront, near the Adorni Center, when she watched a Great Egret come swimming across the channel that separates the shoreline there from Woodley Island. The ordinarily elegant and beautiful white bird clambored out of the water up onto the riprap and hunkered down, apparently exhausted.
Catching the Egret wasn’t that hard. A bedraggled big white bird sitting on rocks is easy to spot, and their exhaustion left them unable to flee when approached. Once captured, it was obvious that this was a juvenile Egret, – this year’s model, who’d probably come into this world just two islands over on Tuluwat, which hosts a large heronry each Spring and Summer.
After getting them back to the clinic, we first provided a warm environment to help with hypothermia, and administered warmed fluids both to help warm the egret as well as to begin rehydrating the seriously depleted bird.
Within a few hours the bird was standing and very pleased to discover the fish that we’d put in their housing with them. For piscivores in trouble, fish is a big part of the solution.
For many patients, a small sample of blood can reveal a lot about their condition. Spinning the sample in a centrifuge separates the blood into cells and plasma, revealing the percentage that is red blood cells. This number is often called the “packed cell volume” or PCV. Red blood cells carry the oxygen that is part of the fuel of life – the lower the PCV, the more anemic the patient. While there is some variation across the many species we treat, for aquatic birds, a PCV of 40 (that is to say that red blood cells make up 40% of the total sample) is considered a baseline of good health. This Egret’s first sample on admission revealed a critically low PCV of 17%. Considering the severity of the bird’s dehydration, it’s safe to say that the actual percentage of red blood cells would be even lower one the patient is rehydrated.
Still, this number didn’t really change the care we offered (warmth, fluids, fish and safety), but it did let us know how close to death the young Egret had come.
After a few days, of hydration and food, the Egret’s PCV had climbed above 20 and they were able to make short evasive flights in the aviary when we would capture for regular exams and weight checks. After 8 days in care the PCV had recovered another 10 points and stood at 30%. After a couple weeks, the Egret was flying beautifully – their PCV was back within normal limits, their weight had increased from 679 grams in admission to 1117 grams – a 160% gain! They looked really good. It was time for release.
Clearly this Egret is thinking, “Outside the box!”
“Two soft kissing kites”, indeed!
Watching an Egret fly from our care out over the mudflats of lowtide on Humboldt Bay is one of the greatest thrills.
A moment to pause and consider this restored freedom!
With a vigorous shake, the Egret dumps the last of humanity that’d been clinging to their feathers. A shiver and we are a memory.
The telephoto lens reveals where the Egret flew.
An adult Great Egret flies in to see what’s going on.
And so we leave them to their private, wild freedom.
Even though many of our patients are injured traumatically, or have become so sick and debilitated that there isn’t anythng we can do to help, and even through the frustrations of living in a human society that casually hinders, harms and destroys wild lives, providing care for the wild, the innocent, provides a wonderful close view of the miracle of healing, the mystery of hunger, and the fulfillment of dreams. This Egret was an astonishing patient. Your support bought the fish, the fluids, the safe space, the net and the gasoline for the rescue, as well as paid for the trained and dedicated staff needed to deliver it all in an effective manner. Thank you for making sure this Great Egret had somewhere and someone who could help them with a second chance.
This is a crucial time in our history, and as we prepare to move our facility to a location that will give us something more stable and sustainable we need your help badly! If you can, please DONATE today
Thank you for making the difference all of our patients need.
Six nestling Barn Owls (Tyto Alba) were admitted to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center mid-July, nestlings who’d been unintentional stowaways on a truckload of hay from Siskiyou county and delivered to Myrtletown.
We’d been planning a trip deep into Siskiyou to return these owls to where they were from. In preparation the owls had each shown they could identify, capture and eat prey (a necessary step when rehabilitating orphaned hunters). They were each expert at flight, in excellent condition, and more than anything else, the aviary was clearly the biggest problem they had. It was time for freedom.
As anyone within five hours of Humboldt Bay probably knows, Siskiyou, Eastern Humboldt, and Trinity counties have been suffering from wild fires since early Summer. Unfortunately for these owls, the place on Earth where they came into the word is under a fire threat.
So we found a location that incorporated some of the characteristics of home, and hoped for the best, in a world that is becoming a patchwork, with all of us leaping from slippery rock to rock, trying to keep it going as we cross this torrent.
It’s not the first time this has happened – a trailer-load of hay from Ashland or Yreka or somewhere else hours away from Humboldt Wildlife Care Center is delivered to a local ranch, only to discover nestling Barn Owls (Tyto alba) hidden with the bales. It’s happened a few times over the decade, in fact. So it wasn’t shocking when that call came in the middle of July – a load of hay just delivered in Eureka that had come down from Siskiyou County brought along the babies of a Barn Owl nest too. We admitted six nestlings that day, dehydrated, hungry and very unhappy.
As nestlings go, these six were pretty far along in their development. Three of them fledged within the first week of care and were moved to an outdoor aviary. Within two weeks, all six owls were flying. Each day each owl was getting at least one “medium” sized rat. (that’s a lot of rats – more on how we pay for it all later).
RIght now, we are helping them prepare for release by learning to hunt. The lessons tend to come pretty easily for them. You could say that they’re naturals. As soon as they demonstrate that they can support themselves, we know the time for their return the Wild is at hand.
Fledgling Barn Owl getting a routine examination while in care at HWCC.
Clinic staff administer fluid therapy on a dehydrated Barn owl nestling.
A young owl’s wing with new feathers that have not yet flown.
They sure fly now, and soon in total freedom.
These six Barn Owls are getting a second chance at wild freedom. They came so close to being among the many untallied victims of a human world that kills randomly and without recognition simply by operating as it was inended – We grow the hay, we store it, we ship it – none of it meant to harm owls, and none of it meant to prevent harm either. It’s in this world that we meet our mission. And we can only do it with your help. We’ve already spent over a thousand dollars on food for these beautiful and innocent wild lives. That’s only example of the real difference your support makes. Your support pays for the heating pads, the fluids, the aviary, the phone and the dedicated and skilled staff it takes to make the whole thing fly. Thank you!!
REMINDER! This is our last year at our curent location. YOur help is needed making this challenging move. Read more about it here and again, your support will help us a lot. It’s getting urgent!
Since we realized that we needed to relocate Humboldt Wildlife Care Center from its current location in Bayside to somewhere suitable and sustainable back in March of 2021, with less than two years to accomplish to the move, there has been a background of stress about our future that has added a layer of urgency to each day of operation – the clock is ticking!
After months of searching and considering multiple scenarios, at last, we’ve settled on a property that is available and accessible and meets most of the criteria we’d established. While the asking price is much more than we have, it’s also the most affordable we’ve been able to find. We’ve come to an agreement with the property owner for the lot, which, happily is nearly 6 times larger than our current leased quarter-acre. With this major step achieved, now we enter the next big challenge: secure the funds!
Sneak peek of future site of HWCC, once we secure the funding!
We don’t have much time now. We need to be on our new site and operating by the first of the new year, as well as have cleared our old site from our soon-to-be-former landlord’s land. This is a very tall order. We will not be successful without the help from our community, especially financially. Still, that we’ve even found a piece of property that we can use is very relieving – it hadn’t been looking too good for too many months!
The new location is in Manila, which has many advantages for our work. I think we will be well-placed to continue and expand our reach in our region. As the Crow flies, we’re just moving across the bay.
Another view of this future diamond in the current rough!
What a year it’s been! As the director of the Care Center, I don’t think we’ve faced a more challenging time – between my health problems (which thankfully are no problem at all now!), the ongoing pandemic, the record number of patients we’ve admitted over the last two years and the challenges of of this relocation, we are in a swirl of difficulties! Yet guiding us, as always, we have our mission – to serve our region’s wild neighbors in need, to serve the field of widlife rehabilitation with workshops, to educate new rehabilitators, and to help our communities develop the resources and perspectives needed to peacefully co-exist with the Wild, and end our society’s war on Nature. Our mission makes our challenges seem quite manageable indeed! And with your support, which has kept has going for over 40 years, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center will move into a new era of stability and growth.
If we had $500,000 dollars, we could purchase the property and fund the costs of rebuilding of our facility. That’s a lot to raise in such a short period. Realistically, we need to plan on having less resources available – we’ll need to creative and committed. Fortunately, we are well versed in accomplishing a lot with very little. I don’t know how we will do it, but I do know that we will.
Thank you for being here always. You’ve made quality care for our wild neighbors possible. If you’d like to support our work, our land purchase, or the costs of rebuilding, and invest in the continued care available for our wild neighbors, please DONATE! Every gift helps.
You can help return an orphaned or injured wild animal to the wild! You can help keep wild families together! You can help keep our facility functional and clean! Volunteers are needed for all tasks. After putting our volunteer program on hold in March of 2020, we’ve been slowly rebuilding it, adding volunteers to our shifts as the pandemic has allowed, and now we are ready to add more.
Volunteers are a crucial element in the field of wildlife rehabilitation. All wildlife rehab facilitities operate on shoestring budgets and without the necessary help from volunteers, we’d never last. The pandemic has been brutal on staff and we are very happy to rebuild our core team of volunteers.
The life of a volunteer: One day you’re helping with an opossum, the next day a Bald Eagle.
Some of the tasks that volunteers help with:
1. Cleaning: First and foremost, from the newest, most inexperienced volunteer to the director of our facility, a major task for all of us is cleaning. Laundry, dishes, sweeping, mopping, sanitizing – these are mission critical in a hospital setting and your experience in your own life will serve here! If you’re new to this kind of maintenance, we can help you and you dont have to get a job in the food service industry to learn it (as many of us did, like me!). We also have to clean the patient housing, which means that you will be trained in how to work around a frightened wild animal, without making the stress much worse.
2. Feeding: Patient food must be prepared at least twice a day. Want to learn what it takes to emulate a diet that a wild diet in the setting of temporary captive care? It’s a great skill to have and it won’t be long before you’lll understand the intricacies, and the principles that support them, of feeding a wild animal a nutritional diet that is familiar and therefore stress reductive.
3. Examinations: Helping staff perform routine examinations of our patients. In order to perform an assessment of the condition of our patients, routine exams are given. Volunteers learn valuable handling skills that protect the caregiver and the patient from harm. Instructions, safety protocols, and personal protective equipment are provided as needed.
4. Transportation: If you can drive from Oregon to Laytonville and sometimes beyond, then you can help us with transportation for patients. The region we serve is huge and we have to travel as many 3 hours away to pick up orphaned and injured wild neighbors. Simply driving all day can be a very big help to an animal who desperately needs a second chance.
5. Rescue: Many times people report an animal in trouble, but they are unable to do anything about it. They call us. We go out on missions to rescue wild animals every day. Even as a new volunteer you can still participate simply by driving. Capturing wild animals in need is a skill, but you will be provided with the training and the safety equipment to be a hero!
6. Releases: Returning an animal to their birthright of wild freedom is a joy beyond compare. Transporting animals to their release site and helping to ensure their safe return to the life that they were born to is one of the regular bits of supreme awesome-osity that can be yours simply by being here helping!
7. Answering the phone: Helping people resolve conflicts with wild animals is an important part of our daily work. Keeping wild families together – in other words preventing wild babies from becoming orphans is a serious task, can be difficult, and largely happens on the phone in conversation with someone who may be at their wit’s end. Learn to advocate for wild animals in an effective manner by answering the phone in our clinic. It can be challenging, but that just makes our successes sweeter!
8. Humane Solutions! Sometimes keeping wild families together requires an intervention. In order to stop a trapper or some other cruel plan to get rid of an unwated wild animal, we go to the scene and work with the people to keep the wild family safe while conving them that it would be ebst if they moved on. This is delicate work that can also take us on an adventure through people’s crawlspaces and attics. Not for everyone, but if it’s for you, you’ll learn valuable skills in humanely solving people’s conflicts with a wild animal.
9. Ambassador: You can be a voice for the rights of Mother Earth and the Wild. Education and outreach are very important parts of our mission. Do you enjoy speaking in public? Do you have a passion for environmental education? Do you want to make people act right toward wildlife? We may be the droids you’re looking for!
Releasing an animal who was going to die without our care is one the greatest joys known to humanity.
These are some of the most common and important ways that we rely on volunteers to meet the challenges of our mission. Just about every wildlife rehabilitator working today began as a volunteer, and many still are volunteers. Many wildlife rehabilitators with their own facilities at their own houses are still volunteers! This is not a well-paid field, unless you factor in the job satisfaction, and in that sense, it’s unparalleled.
But satisfaction isn’t all that you’ll get out of helping us help our wild neighbors. You will get critical training that can be used here or in a larger context. As a member of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network HWCC/bax is your local path toward being qualified to help care for impacted wildlife if there is ever a catastrophic oil spill locally or across the state. Believe me, the only way to make these kinds of disasters less painful is being able to help repair and restore what was broken. Your desire to help begins here!
So if you want to help us help wildlife in a direct hands-on manner, let us know! CLICK HERE TO APPLY
And if your dance card or your plate is already full, you can always help us meet our mission with your generous support. Donations make our world go ’round. Without your financial help, our doors would close forever. PLEASE DONATE HERE
Thank you for your love of the Wild. Love is the most important ingredient in the conservation and protection of our natural home and our wild kin!
It’s a chaotic time in the world and in America especially, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic striking right when public leadership at the highest level in this country is at odds with public health. Every single day Humboldt Wildife Care Center/bird ally x opens our doors to the needs of our wild neighbors and no matter how frightening the times, our dedicated staff show up and get the job done. This is the first in a series of quick posts to catch up the news of our mission.
Here we are, past mid-July, and our pandemic year is only intensifying. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to take the time to write about our work. We rarely have time for more than a brief social media post to keep our supporters aware of how things are going. Our volunteer program remains in hiatus – to protect them, but also to protect our clinic and our mission. Our small wildlife hospital on Humboldt Bay is the only thing of its kind across three counties and we must stay covid-free. Most days we are grossly understaffed. On top of that our caseload is greater than ever – we’ve already provided care for nearly 900 wild neighbors this year to date! Since its founding in 1979, HWCC has not treated so many patients in one 6 and a half month period. In 2013 we treated just over 900 animals for the whole year!
Through our humane solutions program, we’ve helped keep dozens of wild families together, preventing senseless deaths of mother raccoons and skunks, and protecting their babies from becoming orphans. Still, even with these efforts, we currently have more than 75 orphaned wild babies in care.
Right now we are caring for 11 Black-tailed Deer fawns, 14 baby Raccoons, a dozen Striped Skunk babies. Two days we ago released four young American Robins we’d cared for since they were nestlings. We’ve treated Western Gray Squirrels, Deer mice, Opossums, various species of Swallows. Today or tomorrow we’ll be releasing 2 young Great Blue Herons whose nest was destroyed in the windstorm of mid-May. Now they are fully grown and able to hunt for their own fish. We’ll be taking them back to the Trinity River.
For the last two months, four young Gray foxes have been growing up in our care. The stage where we provide them live crickets to begin their lessons in providing their own meals has begun. The joy of helping these young intelligent predators reach their true destiny is indescribable. Pictures help!
Four Gray fox kits warily watch their caregiver as she prepares to capture them for their weekly examination. Keeping these wild predators wild is critical to their successful release!
Currently we also have 3 baby Common Murres in care, and several more brought to us as they were dying. Sad as this is, it might be a good sign for the local population of Common Murres, as the last few years their breeding colonies had largely failed, and this might mean that there are more babies making it to sea this year.
Not only our increased workload with decreased staffing has cost us, though; a huge stress has been the funding. As the pandemic has hit our human economy hard, it has taken a toll on the resources available for our wild neighbors, wild neighbors who are in our care because of what the human built world has done to them. It’s been hard to ask for financial support during a time of such economic stress, but we aren’t going to be run on magic forever. We do have a real electric bill, water bill, rent bill, fish bill, staff wages and more to pay. Right now we need your help. It’s critical.
To all who’ve been supporting us through this, thank you. Your contributions are more than material. You lift our spirits too.
Please contribute if you can. Every little bit helps.
September 22 2009 several friends sat down at the end of the workday at a seabird hospital to work on an outline for a workshop we’d be presenting at a wildlife rehabilitation conference the following Spring: An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation. At the end of our meeting, we stuck around to talk about a crazy idea – an idea hatched on the shores of Lummi Island Washington and fledged at the edge of the Suisun Marsh, home to 10 percent of the remaining wetlands of California.
The idea was for a collective of wildlife caregivers, who could help other caregivers deal with difficult times and cases, both through directly aiding them, as well as producing reference material, a library of helpful advice.
Dr Shannon Riggs, BAX co-founder visits Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. Staff and interns look forward to Shannon’s visits eagerly. She is an excellent teacher and our time with her is too rare!
To me, the idea was slightly embarrassing to propose since it sounded almost cartoon-ish – wildlife rehabilitators’ Super Friends – and the fact that our proposed name didn’t help alleviate that impression also had caused some reticence. But as is so often the case, a foolhardy courage prevailed and Bird Ally X was soon in flight.
Besides the workshop, which we’ve since presented many times across California and the USA, our primary mission was to share the skills and tools necessary to provide effective and ethical aquatic wild bird care. Later we would amend our mission to include all wild animals.
BAX co-founders, from right, January Bill, Laura Corsiglia, Marie Travers, on site at the Lower Klamath Basin refuge, 2018.
The six of us who produced the original workshop, Shannon Riggs, DVM, January Bill, Marie Travers, Vann Masvidal, Laura Corsiglia, and myself, met as colleagues in oiled wildlife response. In fact we first worked together as a whole on the November 2007 oil spill in San Francisco Bay caused when the Cosco Busan collided with the Bay Bridge in heavy fog, leaking well over 50,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the water. Approximately 1500 aquatic birds were rescued and brought into care by the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, and treated at the San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center, in Fairfield.
Previous to this event each of us had extensive wildlife rehabilitation experience, on other oil spills and at other facilities, working with a variety of species, from songbirds to raccoons, from cougars to hawks. Most of us had worked in less privileged circumstances than we did as oil spill responders due to the lack resources available to the average wildlife rehabilitation facility. Working in oil response provided us the opportunity to develop skills, techniques, and protocols when working with large numbers of aquatic birds that we knew most wildlife rehabilitators simply couldn’t access.
BAX co-founder Vann Masvidal conducts a workshop on wound management at an annual wildlife rehabilitation conference.
Treating 1500 birds at one time will sharpen your skills quite quickly; repeatedly working in such an environment over the course of years will make you a leader in the field. All of us felt a need to share those skills and de-centralize them. There is far more coast, far more interior land, than the few specialized wildlife hospitals for aquatic birds could ever cover. To ensure that aquatic birds have quality care available when in need requires that we spread the benefits of our own experience and training.
While working at the Oiled Wildlife Care Network in the Bay Area, we routinely received sick and injured aquatic birds from as far away as Humboldt County, which did not yet have the facility or available skilled staff to provide care for aquatic birds. At the San Francisco facility we even once helped 140 seabirds caught in a harmful algal bloom off the coast of Astoria, Oregon. Clearly it would be better for the animals in need, if care was closer than 300-500 miles away.
The first Bird Ally X publication, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation, began as a handout for our workshop participants in 2010. By 2012, our little “handout” had become a 152 page textbook. An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation is now in its second edition with over 1500 copies sold.
An aquatic bird care workshop that we could deliver at conferences and on-site at various facilities was our first step toward meeting our mission, complemented by our first publication, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Care.
In August 2011, we met our first major challenge when we learned that juvenile Brown Pelicans were suffering from contamination by oily fish waste around Humboldt and Del Norte counties. We partnered with Humboldt Wildlife Care Center (HWCC) in Bayside to have a facility to provide care for approximately 50 young Brown pelicans. Over the next few years, we managed the rehabilitation program at HWCC, building its capacity to provide care for more of the wild animals who make their living and home on the North Coast.
HWCC/bax Assistant Rehab Manager Lucinda Adamson doesn’t mind a little rain when resotring a patient’s wild freedom.Wildlife care intern Nora Chatmon (left) prepares to tube-feed a starving Common Murre (Uria Aalge) desperate for calories, while staff rehabilitator Stephanie Owens holds the patient.
In 2014, seeing the opportunity to have an excellent facility that also doubles as a working lab for developing protocols and training future wildlife care providers, BAX took complete responsibility for HWCC, now HWCC/bax. To date nearly 60 interns, predominantly life science students at the nearby Humboldt State University, have passed through our program, with many going on to successful careers in wildlife rehabilitation and other wildlife related work.
As our co-founders no longer work together each day in the same facility, we meet up as often as time permits. Laura and I are here in Humboldt, where I’m the director of HWCC, and Laura continues her role as publications coordinator and art director. January Bill is now in Klamath Falls, Oregon, which puts her in a perfect position to bring excellent protocols and practices to the chronic avian botulism problem on the Lower Klamath Basin Refuge, rescuing and rehabilitating over 700 water birds in the last two years. Marie Travers works closely with January on the avian botulism problem and on their joint work focusing on patient stress in wildlife care. Marie continues her work as an oil spill responder as well.
HWCC/bax Volunteer Coordinator Ruth Mock speaks for the Opossums.
Shannon Riggs and Vann Masvidal each work with Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay, where they treat thousands of animals each year, many of them seabirds, and they continue to be the backbone of our board of directors.
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center we’ve added excellent people to our crew. Lucinda Adamson, who was an intern during our second fish waste Pelican crisis in 2012 is now the Assistant Wildlife Rehabilitation Manager. Stephanie Owens, who began as a volunteer in 2014 is now a staff rehabilitator. Ruth Mock is volunteer coordinator.
Recent additions to our permanent gang, who recently completed internships, Brooke Brown who works with our humane solutions program for co-existing with our wild neighbors, and Desiree Vang, another recently graduated intern who is helping us with our membership data and other administrative tasks. Both continue to work in animal care in the clinic as well.
Lucinda Adamson and recent intern graduate Desiree Vang perform an admission exam on an American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos).Happy Recent internship graduate, Brooke Brown in the moment of joy immediately after seeing a healthy patient fly away.
Bird Ally X has a mission that will never be completed, because there will always be more to discover and more to teach. Moreover, it seems obvious that centralized solutions to global problems are a luxury that we won’t be able to afford much longer. Sooner more likely than later, our safety nets will be tested and it’s safe to assume that the well-being of individual wild animals will be ‘de-prioritized’ at the institutional level. But we know that it will be a concern to individual humans that individual animals receive proper treatment when in need.
As its ultimate mission, BAX must help ensure that those people, however burdened, however underfunded, however remote, have access to the best possible techniques to provide care for as many species as they can. Based on today’s degraded environment, we imagine the potential of ecological catastrophe and the damaging impact our foundering industrial society might have on our wild neighbors and we prepare to meet the needs of those who will provide their care.
When the Oiled Wildlife Care Network holds a training in region 1, nearly all participants are BAX staff, interns and volunteers!Tabytha Sheeley, an HWCC/bax intern now employed at Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay.
Whether it’s the hundreds of ducks on the Lower Klamath or the 1200+ wild animals we treat in Humboldt each year, not only are we there for those innocent lives, but we are there are also for the knowledge we can gain to be passed on to our colleagues and future colleagues; – that can be shared with our fellow lovers of the wild – that can be taught to children about the sentience and self-ownership of all that is wild and free – about our own wild freedom that pulses with every beat of our hearts.
Ten years is a long time, yet it is barely a beginning! We’ve met many challenges to get where we are, but we have so many more to overcome. Your support has made our accomplishments (and survival!) possible. With your continued support we will meet our continuing goals, such as fully realizing HWCC/bax as a teaching wildlife hospital, and helping to bring a greater level of compassion to bear on our wild neighbors, and thereby reduce the need for our services.
It’s a dream. It’s a dream you can help make real. Please donate today and let’s help make certain that the next ten years brings us closer to our goal.
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax, we treat well over a thousand orphaned or injured wild animals each year. But we help thousands more without ever getting close to them! Every Spring and Summer day our phone rings dozens of times as people run across wild animals in strange situations. Maybe they are in a conflict with a wild animal who is using their home as a den site, or a nest has been knocked down when limbing a tree.
A sunny warm Sunday in Spring is a perfect time to practice our phone skills! Here one our awesome interns (Erika Espino) plays the role of a caller who has a problem with a denning Raccoon
Many of these problems can be solved on the phone! We’ve helped hundreds of people co-exist with Raccoons by coaching them through convincing a mother Raccoon to den somewhere besides their crawlspace. We’ve assisted hundreds more over the years in getting baby birds back in their nests, or rebuilding their nests if they’ve been unintentionally destroyed.
Solving conflicts over the phone isn’t easy! Often, people who call are very frustrated and a little bit mad at the wild animal trying to use their space. Patience is usually required in order to get through this part of the call. But we always remember: The caller wants our help. They want to do the right thing. That’s why they called us.
And our solutions have to work! There are always those in any community who will leap to the lethal solution. If our program doesn’t get the job done, there is a very good chance that the caller will opt for violence and be forever convinced that humane solutions to conflict aren’t effective.
An HSU wildlife student and one of our wonderful volunteers (Alex Rivera) practices helping resolve denning Raccoon problems.
When you are on the phone with someone who is upset about the actions of a wild animal, and that animal’s life is on the line, the moment can be very stressful. As with all stressful tasks, preparation is critical!
We offer volunteers and staff regular opportunities to sharpen their phone skills with our Phone Workshop, which Bird Ally X developed. Using the details of actual calls, our participants practice helping various callers resolve a conflict or get a wild animal the care they need. Teaching the next generation of wildlife care providers the skills we’ve all acquired over the decades of practice is an important part of our mission. Operating Humboldt Wildlife Care Center not only provides help for the injured and orphaned wild neighbors of our region, and not only resolves wildlife conflicts peacefully saving perhaps thousands more each year, but our small facility on the edge of Humboldt Bay acts as our lab and ongoing classroom to develop and teach effective ways of caring for our wild neighbors and promoting co-existence with the Wild.
Your support makes this work possible! Thank you! Want to help? Please donate today! DONATE
A volunteer feeds young Cliff Swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) on the verge of taking their first flight from our fledging box into the bright songbird aviary just beyond the screen. (photo: Laura Corsiglia /BAX)
Right now, our wildlife clinic, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, has nearly 100 patients in care. Ranging from a dozen Cliff Swallows, each from a nest somehow destroyed, to an Osprey whose feathers were badly singed by a nest fire near Weaverville; – from 23 orphaned young Raccoons to the 3 chipmunks found in a garage after their mother was killed by a trap.
We need your help! Want to help buy the formula, the fish, the supplies, the water, the electricity and more that we need? Click here to make a contribution through paypal, or send a check! Thank you!!!
Every day our phone rings dozens of times with calls from our neighbors near and far who’ve had an encounter, a conflict, or a question about a wild animal they just saw. Most people who call want to find help for an animal in need. Not every one who calls is a friend of the wild.
We give each caller the best we have, to advocate for the wild. The situation could be anything. It may be an animal in a trap, desperate for release and it is our task to make sure this is done, or it may be that there’s a nest with just hatched babies that someone wants to remove, or someone 80 miles away may have found an orphan who needs stabilizing care as soon as possible, and we are the closest facility.
Each call is that animal’s last shot at another chance. And sometimes we fail.
Sometimes the person calling doesn’t want to let the opossum out of the trap and the line goes dead. We call back and there is no answer. And we have nearly one hundred patients in care. Maybe we can’t save this opossum, but we do have other mouths to feed. So we move forward, carrying the phone in our pocket.
Summer is a remarkable season for a wildlife rehabilitation clinic. For many others, it’s a time of relaxation and outdoor enjoyment. For us, our hours are long; the tasks are hard. Still, the joys of seeing our patients mature into capable juveniles and adults are immeasurable. And the slow, silent changes the work makes in us – day in, day out – minute by minute – year by year – are endlessly surprising. We might expect to rise in the morning and find leaves growing from our hair, or certain desires to back into our musky dens and rest our chins on our forepaws through the night.
We do a pretty good job raising fierce little wild raccoons who we are certain are ready to be free in the wild universe at their release. We have good raccoon feeding protocols, and we watch them closely for success. We keep the intelligent and inqusitive young explorers as apart from us as we can, so that they might always prefer a field we don’t dominate. We give them the best schooling we can on where the food is, and why climbing is important. We keep them safe until keeping them causes them harm. It takes about 4 months, usually. Over 80% of the orphaned raccoon we treat make it. When they don’t survive, they are usually very young.
Last week, we lost a little guy, a male raccoon, small enough to hold in your hand. He went suddenly. In the course of a few hours on a weekend afternoon, he went from seemingly healthy to dead. His eyes had been open about ten days. Once his death was confirmed, we opened him to learn why. There were no clues. Just small raccoon ribs making a beautiful tiny cavern for his pink lungs and there, right against his spine, his wee raccoon heart. From his ancestral past to his guard hairs and whiskers to his utter core he was a beautiful raccoon, all wild, all fierce…
Our clinic is a small one. There are bigger facilities in other parts of the state, all over the world. We treat about 1200 patients each year and we help resolve the conflicts that may be saving a few thousand more from becoming injured that time, that day.
We operate on a quarter-acre of land alongside Jacoby Creek on the edge of Humboldt Bay. Our ‘campus’ consists of a double-wide mobile unit with thoughtful and frugal recovery enclosures for a variety of species, built in manner of homestead outbuildings on our very meager budget. Yet we are one of the points of congress between the built world and the wild.
Our clinic is a portal between the human and the wild that operates every day of the year. Our daily proximity to the wild, in the form of her orphaned and injured children, exposes caregivers, makes us more wild. Here at the center of the Redwood Coast, on the edge of our great Western Sea, under the sky and standing on ground that has seen thousands of years joy and sorrow, beauty and tragedy – suffered the losses of forests, of people, of species, of stability, here we are, now, alive, breathing, dreaming, and striving to help those for whom there would be nothing if we weren’t here.
We are one of the small hearts you’ll find at the center of everything.
PLEASE HELP. Your contribution goes directly toward our mission.
